Francis X. Timmes — Page 2

arXiv2006

The Laminar Flame Speedup by Neon-22 Enrichment in White Dwarf Supernovae

Carbon-oxygen white dwarfs contain neon-22 formed from alpha-captures onto nitrogen during core He burning in the progenitor star. In a white dwarf (type Ia) supernova, the neon-22 abundance determines, in part, the neutron-to-proton ratio and hence the abundance of radioactive nickel-56 that powers the lightcurve. The neon-22 abundance also changes the burning rate and hence the laminar flame speed. We tabulate the flame speedup for different initial carbon and neon-22 abundances and for a range of densities. This increase in the laminar flame speed--about 30% for a neon-22 mass fraction of 6%--affects the deflagration just after ignition near the center of the white dwarf, where the laminar speed of the flame dominates over the buoyant rise, and in regions of lower density ~ 10^7 g/cm3 where a transition to distributed burning is conjectured to occur. The increase in flame speed will decrease the density of any transition to distributed burning.

astro-ph↗

arXiv2006

Hydrodynamic simulations of He-shell flash convection

We present the first hydrodynamic, multi-dimensional simulations of He-shell flash convection. Specifically, we investigate the properties of shell convection at a time immediately before the He- luminosity peak during the 15th thermal pulse of a stellar evolution track with initially two solar masses and metallicity Z=0.01. This choice is a representative example of a low-mass asymptotic giant branch thermal pulse. We construct the initial vertical stratification with a set of polytropes to resemble the stellar evolution structure. Convection is driven by a constant volume heating in a thin layer at the bottom of the unstable layer. We calculate a grid of 2D simulations with different resolutions and heating rates. Our set of simulations includes one low-resolution 3D run. The computational domain includes 11.4 pressure scale heights. He-shell flash convection is dominated by large convective cells that are centered in the lower half of the convection zone. Convective rolls have an almost circular appearance because focusing mechanisms exist in the form of the density stratification for downdrafts and the heating of localized eddies that generate upflows. Nevertheless, downdrafts appear to be somewhat more focused. The He-shell flash convection generates a rich spectrum of gravity waves in both stable layers above and beneath the convective shell. The magnitude of the convective velocities from our 1D mixing-length theory model and the rms-averaged vertical velocities from the hydrodynamic model are consistent within a factor of a few. However, the velocity profile in the hydrodynamic simulation is more asymmetric, and decays exponentially inside the convection zone. [abbreviated]

astro-ph↗